@Sruly - thanks for the comment and pointing me in the right direction. I'd still be interested in UI professionals opinions based on just the accessibility/semantic mark-up criteria though.
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SnifferAug 10 '10 at 8:36

8 Answers
8

As mentioned above, there are different aspects of accessibility when discussing a CMS:

The presentation/theme/skin layer

The system that outputs data/code to presentation layer

The content itself

(in addition the accessibility of the content entry tools may also be a consideration)

Each of the aspects listed above can be built to encourage or discourage accessibility. While I applaud your effort to consider accessibility so early in the process, I would actually recommend identifying a few tools that meet all of your functional requirements and then evaluating them for accessibility.

To get some better recommendations, a few details on your requirements might be helpful. For example, for basic CMS needs WordPress might even be a good fit and has a good track record regarding accessibility: http://codex.wordpress.org/Accessibility

That said, I'd just like to add that regardless of which CMS you use, accessibility is more cultural than technical. It does not matter whether your CMS starts accessible if it does not stay that way. Anybody who touches code for the web needs to be trained on what accessibility means, what works, and what doesn't. They don't necessarily need to become experts, but if you do not attend to the training side of the equation, you're very likely to wind up with poorly coded content that breaks accessibility because the writer simply never stopped to consider how well it works for people who can't see, or hear, or who are paralyzed, and so on.

I did an accessibility review of a site for a large library once, in which I came across this piece of code:

This is one of the saddest things I've ever seen in the world of coding. At some point, the site had a coder who know how screen readers worked. The "hidden nav" was put there to provide a convenient method for screen reader users to return their cursor to the top of the section. But the institution failed to internalize the practice of accessibility, and after that knowledgeable coder left, their successor disabled this accessibility feature -- not out of malice, but out of puzzlement. "RH" had certainly never used a screen reader, if indeed they had heard tell of such a thing, and the code really doesn't make sense unless you realize that it's supposed to be read aloud.

So -- I applaud your efforts to pick an accessible CMS. But please, please don't imagine that the job stops there. If you neglect the human side of the equation, your good work will slowly but surely decay over time.

The reason that most CMS produce web sites with horrific HTML and CSS and semantics and accessibility is that most CMSes aren't very good at content management, and then try to make up for that by being 'design management'.

The best CMS will have absolutely no automated templating. Templating should be left to the competent web developers and designers.

If the CMS highlights 'easy page layout' or 'robust templates' assume that it's going to take full control of our output and it will suck at it.

I think it is not about skin and template. it is all about generating semantic contents in markup related to the content on the page and templates don't know any thing about page's content.
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Morteza M.Aug 11 '10 at 21:32

One thing to note that WCAG are just guidelines and like HTML specs, each products interpretation can be different as there are not black and white rules on the spec. You'll get "accessible" sites but ultimately in the end, its up to you and your users to determine what's enough.

GraffitiCMS makes your markup as semantically correct as you want it. It all depends on the quality of your theme code. The content itself is semantically correct if you use their WYSIWYG editor for generating the content.

I can provide you with several examples of great sites using Graffiti if you are interested.

Oh good lord, NO! They may adhere to some sort of technical accessibility guidelines, but SharePoint is anything but semantic markup. It's also incredibly bloated and clumsy as a CMS.
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DA01Jun 30 '11 at 20:34

I have to second @DA01. As someone who needs larger fonts and gentler color schemes, I've had no end of trouble with SharePoint, at least as it's used in my company. Some functions only work in IE (which has its own accessibility problems), the standard layouts are very wide (= horizontal scroll), and some things are hard to see in reverse video (I think they hard-wired some black text or something).
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Monica CellioJun 30 '11 at 20:54